Pols give him credit for offering a deficit-cutting plan that made some concessions.

WASHINGTON — Pat Toomey returns to Allentown for Thanksgiving with more stature in the U.S. Senate, but also as a member of the supercommittee that failed.

It doesn't matter how well the team hit in Game 3, if it didn't win the World Series.

"There's going to be a degree of failure attached to anyone on that committee because at the end of the day, they didn't get a deal," said Chris Borick, Muhlenberg College political analyst. "Pat Toomey helped his case by showing a proposal that included some compromise, but will be considered more for being part of an effort that failed to get the deal done. That's the nature of the spotlight."

On Monday evening, after 12 weeks of talks, the supercommittee walked away from its mandate to trim at least $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit, its co-chairmen conceding "it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement."

Toomey, for his part, came up with a plan that gained support from many of his Republican colleagues. It raised revenues by eliminating or reducing tax deductions and loopholes, but also lowered federal tax rates.

Shortly after the supercommittee officially declared itself dead, Toomey spoke with reporters. Asked if he felt as though he had failed, the Zionsville resident said he did his best.

"I feel like I made every possible effort that I could. I think I pushed my [GOP] conference as far as we possibly could. We put revenue on the table that I didn't think was necessary. ... I feel in good conscience that I offered, and my Republican colleagues offered, everything we could and then some."

From the start, Democrats viewed Toomey's proposal as a "nonstarter."

"It is regressive and reaches down into middle America. ... The Toomey plan still results in the biggest tax cut since the Great Depression," U.S. Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat, said on Sunday's "Meet the Press."

"It would be the biggest tax cut since Calvin Coolidge. And we all know how that turned out. Now we didn't come here to do another tax cut to the wealthiest people while we've asked fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid who are poor to ante up more."

Toomey said Monday night that Kerry's characterization of his plan was inaccurate. Toomey said in his proposal all income tax rates would be lowered by 20 percent. The amount of itemized deductions a taxpayer could take would be capped, which Toomey said disproportionally would affect the wealthiest Americans. That was expected to generate $250 billion over 10 years.

Toomey's plan was always just an idea and never written down, so there aren't many specifics. Democrats said Toomey wanted to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67. Toomey's office denied that was part of his plan. Toomey's plan would have trimmed Social Security benefits about $160 billion over a decade by changing the cost-of-living estimate used to set them.

"I thought Sen. Toomey looked good in the process, given that he did make some concessions, though they weren't big enough [to get Democrats]," said Darrell West of the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning Washington think tank. "He did get some Republicans off the 'no new taxes' line. ... He deserves credit for that."

Toomey, sounding exhausted, said the supercommittee's failure sends a "discouraging message" to Americans. He called it a "disappointing exercise."

In the coming days and weeks, there will be plenty of finger-pointing and blame over which side let the talks break down. But it's exactly that kind of hyper partisanship that Jonathan Miller, a co-founder of No-Labels, a group that calls for bi-partisanship in government, says is why the supercommittee failed.

With Congress' job approval already hovering in single digits, Miller said individually for Toomey and collectively for Congress, the failure won't hit too hard.

"I think the shame of it is there probably isn't going to be much of a ramification because it was expected they were going to fail," Miller said. "It's an illustration of the problems our country faces."